1 Introduction

Interactive tree of life (iTOL) is a web-based tool used to upload, display, manipulate and annotate phylogenetic trees all from your browse.

2 Upload data

You can upload your tree on the My Trees tab. It is recommended to create an account on iTOl to save your tree for more than 30 days.

2.1 Sharing Data

You can toggle project sharing on your My Trees tab. Others can axcess only your shared project if they put in you iTol id in the shared projects tab. While collaborators may be able to edit and save views on their account, the original project will remain unedited and the views others have saved will not be seen.

2.2 Pruning

This process involves selecting one or several branches from an individual tree. You can select a node or a leave by left-clicking on it. After selecting a branch a popup will come showing the total number of leaves that have selected. These leaves will be highlighted in green.

2.3 Collapsing

When the tree is just too large to prune, you can collapse nodes to tidy up and make your tree more manageable. Collapsed nodes will be shown as triangles. You can later expand the collapsed tree after pruning, by clicking the collapsed node and pressing expand.

2.4 Searching

The search tool on the top left side of the screen allows you to find the specific leaves. Searching your tree will bring back similar results that you can click on to determine where they are located on the tree. The leaves will be highlighted red and will have a circle around them if they are visible.

3 Uploading Datasets

Datasets can be added to your tree by drag the .txt dataset file on to your tree or by pressing the plus button on the bottom right of the screen. Multiple types of datasets can be used, each with a template that must be followed. The first figure is the template for Multi-value bar charts and the next figure is the resulting bar charts on the tree.

4 Exporting

In itol will be able to export your tree and its anootations into multiple formats,a few exampls are PNG, PDF and plain text files like newick. This can all be done in your control panel under the export tab.